Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(165)

“I’m going outside to watch the sun go down over the river. Maybe you’ll send her to visit with me a little when she gets back from the Deanes’.”

Lucy looked relieved, and Dan thought David did, as well. To them she would always be a mystery. Would it help to tell them she would always be one to him? Probably not.

“Good luck, chief,” Billy said.

On the back stoop where Abra had once lain in a state that wasn’t unconsciousness, John Dalton joined him. “I’d offer to give you moral support, but I think you have to do this alone.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“Yes. At Lucy’s request.”

“No good?”

John shrugged. “She’s pretty closed up on the subject.”

“I was, too,” Dan said. “At her age.”

“But you never broke every plate in your mother’s antique breakfront, did you?”

“My mother didn’t have a breakfront,” Dan said.

He walked down to the bottom of the Stones’ sloping backyard and regarded the Saco, which had, courtesy of the declining sun, become a glowing scarlet snake. Soon the mountains would eat the last of the sunlight and the river would turn gray. Where there had once been a chainlink fence to block the potentially disastrous explorations of young children, there was now a line of decorative bushes. David had taken the fence down the previous October, saying Abra and her friends no longer needed its protection; they could all swim like fish.

But of course there were other dangers.


2

The color on the water had faded to the faintest pink tinge—ashes of roses—when Abra joined him. He didn’t have to look around to know she was there, or to know she had put on a sweater to cover her bare shoulders. The air cooled quickly on spring evenings in central New Hampshire even after the last threat of snow was gone.

(I love my bracelet Dan)

She had pretty much dropped the uncle part.

(I’m glad)

“They want you to talk to me about the plates,” she said. The spoken words had none of the warmth that had come through in her thoughts, and the thoughts were gone. After the very pretty and sincere thank-you, she had closed her inner self off to him. She was good at that now, and getting better every day. “Don’t they?”

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“I told her I was sorry. I told her I didn’t mean to. I don’t think she believed me.”

(I do)

“Because you know. They don’t.”

Dan said nothing, and passed on only a single thought:

(?)

“They don’t believe me about anything!” she burst out. “It’s so unfair! I didn’t know there was going to be booze at Jennifer’s stupid party, and I didn’t have any! Still, she grounds me for two f*cking weeks!”

(? ? ?)

Nothing. The river was almost entirely gray now. He risked a look at her and saw she was studying her sneakers—red to match her skirt. Her cheeks now also matched her skirt.

“All right,” she said at last, and although she still didn’t look at him, the corners of her lips turned up in a grudging little smile. “Can’t fool you, can I? I had one swallow, just to see what it tasted like. What the big deal is. I guess she smelled it on my breath when I came home. And guess what? There is no big deal. It tasted horrible.”

Dan did not reply to this. If he told her he had found his own first taste horrible, that he had also believed there was no big deal, no precious secret, she would have dismissed it as windy adult bullshit. You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.

“I really didn’t mean to break the plates,” she said in a small voice. “It was an accident, like I told her. I was just so mad.”

“You come by it naturally.” What he was remembering was Abra standing over Rose the Hat as Rose cycled. Does it hurt? Abra had asked the dying thing that looked like a woman (except, that was, for the one terrible tooth). I hope it does. I hope it hurts a lot.

“Are you going to lecture me?” And, with a lilt of contempt: “I know that’s what she wants.”

“I’m out of lectures, but I could tell you a story my mother told me. It’s about your great-grandfather on the Jack Torrance side. Do you want to hear it?”

Abra shrugged. Get it over with, the shrug said.

“Don Torrance wasn’t an orderly like me, but close. He was a male nurse. He walked with a cane toward the end of his life, because he was in a car accident that messed up his leg. And one night, at the dinner table, he used that cane on his wife. No reason; he just started in whaling. He broke her nose and opened her scalp. When she fell out of her chair onto the floor, he got up and really went to work on her. According to what my father told my mom, he would have beaten her to death if Brett and Mike—they were my uncles—hadn’t pulled him away. When the doctor came, your great-grandfather was down on his knees with his own little medical kit, doing what he could. He said she fell downstairs. Great-Gram—the momo you never met, Abra—backed him up. So did the kids.”

“Why?” she breathed.

“Because they were scared. Later—long after Don was dead—your grandfather broke my arm. Then, in the Overlook—which stood where Roof O’ the World stands today—your grandfather beat my mother almost to death. He used a roque mallet instead of a cane, but it was basically the same deal.”